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According to the cable and phone companies, ISPs are the only way to get broadband. And many people are all too ready to believe that. Still, for millions of Americans, especially those in rural areas that have been left behind, the wind of change has come, in the form of wireless Internet service providersWISPs for short.

"Cable ignores so many people in this country, and often we're able to beat their rates," says Marlon Schafer, president of Odessa Office Equipment. "If it weren't for us, whole towns would be without the Internet." And Schafer isn't exaggerating: His foray into WISPs started in his town of Odessa, Washington. Phone companies said they'd never bring DSL connections to his community, so Schafer connected a T1 from one end of town to the hospital. "Wouldn't you know it, three months later the cable companies all of a sudden wanted to offer service where we were," Schafer laughs.

WISPs, Schafer explains, are like upside-down satellite dishes. Instead of pointing toward the sky, a tower reaches down into the ground to connect to fiber-optic lines, and long-range wireless routers installed in each customer's house point sideways toward the tower. Beyond that, the equipment can vary. "We use a lot of different equipment and technologies that can give near-T1 speedmuch greater than DSL. An example is an installation I did for a woman 15 miles from town. We used a MikroTik RouterBoard 433 as the access point, similar to a wireless router in a house, except the outdoor version." He also fitted the customer's laptop with a special Ethernet-to-wireless adapter.

Still, for those who have access to both cable or DSL and wireless, the decision can be tough. On the one hand, the bigger names will stay in business, and seem a safer bet. On the other, Schafer is quick to point out the MCIs and US Wests of the world, big companies that went down and took their customers' ability to download with them. "Consumers may believe that we don't offer as strong a setup, but I can bring 10-meg service a good deal of the time. Many cable companies have a hard time competing with that," Schafer says. As for the speed consumers need, Schafer says there are very few customers who are so demanding that WISP speeds won't cut it for them. "I knew a guy who three weeks ago was working broadband through Windows 95. It wasn't the fastest, but we're still basically looking at an Ethernet connection."

In terms of the number of WISP customers nationally, Schafer believes there could be upward of three million users, though getting concrete data is a challenge. There are approximately 100 WISPs filed with the FCC, for example. Matt Larsen, owner of Vistabeam in Gering, Nebraska, says the WISP opportunity has come from a lack of respect, particularly for rural customers. "There's this idea floating around that rural communities aren't technologically savvy," he says. "They are. They just lack the connectivity. I have an access point that sits in the middle of a cow pasture for a town of 100 homes. Eighty of those homes are getting broadband. Does that sound like a place that doesn't care about technology?"

Dustin Jurman, president of Tampa's Rapid Systems, sees WISPs as a community service, not just as opportunity for independents to grab market share. He learned this firsthand when his home state dealt with a natural disaster. "Florida obviously got hit badly by hurricanes over the years, and we were a big part in setting up places with the Internet again," he remembers. "It was a way of helping out fellow service providers and showing our value."

His problem is overcoming the perception that WISPs are just know-nothings with routers. "Sometimes I don't like the term because people think of it as small-time," he says. "We have tons of wireless infrastructure. The point is, a WISP can involve hybrid networks bringing infrastructure up a lot quicker than waiting for a phone line." In fact, one of the company's top testimonials came from AT&T, which utilized Rapid Systems' technology to unwire the White House press corps during a presidential visit. Still, Jurman points out that most people's needs aren't on that level. "Customers need to understand that they're asking for more speed than they'll actually ever want. They think they need the cable company because of the high-meg pipes they talk about, but when are you going to use it? We can deliver anywhere from 10 to 150 megs." Bob Moldashel, the owner of Lakeland Communications in Holbrook, New York, firmly agrees. "I've serviced companies with 30 employees all listening to Internet radio stations at once," he recalls. "I doubt they were even using 10 megs."